iTunes killer Spotify heading for App Store?

Have you tried Spotify yet? This slick little service for both Mac and PC is causing quite a stir. Just imagine if your iTunes library contained every song you could ever want. On the plus side, you could find pretty much any music to suit your mood, the downside would be that you would need a hard drive the size of a house to store all the files. Spotify provides all the positives and none of the negatives with its truly impressive streaming service that acts in the same way as iTunes but without any of the hassle of downloading. More importantly, it’s free. Paid plans are available offering additional features but, if you can handle a short advert every three tracks or so, you’ll be fine with the free version. In fact, the advertising model may have to be rethought soon if it suggests any more albums that you can also find on Spotify for free. Impulse buys are almost eradicated.

A world of music… almost
We’ve been playing with Spotify for a week or so now and have, on average, been able to find all the music we searched for, even the more obscure stuff. Because Spotify is reliant on striking deals with labels there are some notable absences such as Dave Matthews Band and The Beatles (surprise surprise!) among others and you won’t always find a complete back catalogue for the artist you’re seeking either. Aside from that, the service is near flawless and, for streaming music (around 160kb/s), surprisingly good quality, even through an unforgiving set of decent speakers.

Additional features include Artist Radio for playing related tracks in a Last.FM kind of way and playlist creation. You can even share playlists with friends and collaborate on them if you wish.

Spotify for iPhone?
So why are we talking about Spotify on iPhone Kung Fu? Well, we’ve heard rumour that the company may be planning an iPhone app too. The YouTube video below shows the iPhone emulation of how the service would work but, as yet, we haven’t heard any confirmation that we’ll see a Spotify app on the App Store or even if Apple would allow such an iTunes killer within its castle walls. Spotify is certainly interested in working on mobile versions of its application as is shown from its current recruitment drive for Android and S60 Mobile developers on its website. Apple has also been a little more relaxed on its App Store acceptance recently too with third party browsers and mail apps arriving for the first time earlier this year. At the moment, however, it’s very much a case of wait and see. For the time being you can enjoy Spotify by downloading the client at www.spotify.com and signing up to create a Spotify account. And, fingers crossed, we could be accessing this vast library of free music on our iPhones soon.